Historic Saint Raphael Church paintings in San Rafael re-hung after repairs

It's been more than two years since 14 "Stations of the Cross" paintings have lined the walls of Saint Raphael Church in San Rafael, but work has begun to rehang the artwork after it underwent rigorous professional restoration.

Saint Raphael employees were busy Thursday placing the cleaned and repaired paintings back into their slanted nooks edged by ornate wooden frames. The almost 95-year-old paintings were created by Italian-born artist Hector Serbaroli in 1919, just before the church opened its doors in 1920. Unfortunately the church only has 12 of Serbaroli's paintings — the other two are replicas made in the mid-1990s after the originals went missing.

Theresa Brunner, volunteer and former curator of the mission museum, said she didn't have the replicas cleaned, but the originals were definitely in need of some special attention.

"There was a significant amount of water damage to the church about two years ago," Brunner said, adding that the stained glass windows leaked down onto the paintings. "There was a lot of soot and grime and candle smoke on them, too."

With the church's blessing and $15,000 from a parishioner, Brunner packed up the paintings in late 2011 and drove them to Santa Barbara, where Patty West of South Coast Fine Art Conservation Center spent about seven months painstakingly restoring each of the 12 paintings.

It cost anywhere from $950 to $2,000 to restore each painting, and it took anywhere from a couple of weeks to a month to repair each one.

West said the paintings appeared to have been restored once before — badly. So it took her and her associate Teen Conlon many hours to repair, clean and restore the artwork.

"The first thing we needed to do was consolidate the flaking paint. When a canvas gets wet it expands. When that happens, it stretches the paint and once the canvas dries and shrinks, it creates all these raised areas of flaky paint," West said.

She then cleaned off all the dirty, yellowed varnish and began fixing the "over-painting" done during the previous restoration, removing added highlights that weren't part of the original work. After filling in gaps on the canvas, she sealed the paintings.

"Once it's all clean we varnish it with an acrylic varnish so they don't yellow," West said.

These painting aren't the only work of Serbaroli's that West has restored. She recently restored three large murals of his at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo.

Serbaroli, who was born in Rome in 1881, lived in Mexico before moving to San Francisco in 1913, according to family accounts. In addition to painting 14 "Stations of the Cross" canvases for Saint Raphael Church, he worked on the interior of William Randolph Hearst's castle at San Simeon and went on to create artwork for multiple Hollywood studios.

Brunner said it's exciting to have the paintings, which are used during Lent worship each year, returned to their original glory.

"The colors now are vibrant," Brunner said. "To have these preserved for the parish is important for our history. The history of this place means so much to me."

Susan Todaro, St. Raphael Church's development director, said parishioners kept asking her when the paintings would be returned. She said it took a long time for them to be hung again because leaks and structural issues needed to be fixed first.

Her job now is to find new lighting for the pieces, as the old incandescent bulbs damaged the canvases.

"Hopefully that will be taken care of within the next couple of weeks," Todaro said.